By the time the fraternal Douglas twins were born four minutes apart on Aug. 16, 1982, their father was a mixed martial artist, in a way.

The Douglas’ father was living in Seattle around the time that Bruce Lee erupted in popularity. He became very interested in martial arts and learned all styles.

Then, he showed his two boys.

“My dad taught us from day one,” David Douglas, the 155-pounder and older of the twins, told MMAjunkie.com. “We don’t have a base style because of the way our dad taught us. He took the best from all styles he learned, without all the bullcrap in between.”

In a separate conversation, Damion Douglas, the 170-pounder younger by those four minutes, remembers it the same way.

“He was really a mixed martial artist of his time,” Damion said. “What he did was more of a combat form, and that’s how he taught it to us. It affected the way we look at the sport.”

Now, it’s time for more fans to see the Douglas twins together. David (8-2 MMA, 2-1 SF) and Damion (3-1 MMA, 0-0 SF), who live a few miles away from one another in the San Francisco area and train together regularly at the Cesar Gracie Jiu-Jitsu Academy, will appear on the same card Friday at “Strikeforce Challengers: Stockton.”

It will be just the second time the brothers have fought on the same card, and the last was successful, as both won at a September 2008 EliteXC show.

Fans will see one brother, David, whose route to a professional career included 22 months in a juvenile facility because his sentence was extended several times due to fighting. He’s a father of two who loves to strike in the cage, not wait for action.

The other brother, Damion, has taken martial arts as part of his life nearly every day since his father began teaching him. He was a bouncer at almost every significant club in San Francisco, but he has left that late-night life to focus more on training and teaching, hoping to advance his career.

Both brothers are now focused on MMA, hoping to take another step with a Strikeforce opportunity that will be special for both.

“We’ve been fighting our whole lives, and now we’re getting some recognition,” Damion said. “It’s a big night for my family, and we want to make more good things happen.”

David, The Older

David talked about his troubles near the top of the conversation.

“Martial arts saved my life in a lot of ways,” he said. “If not for martial arts, I don’t know where I would be.”

That troubled time began when David was 15 years old and was caught with a gun in school. On probation because of it, David got in trouble again not longer after when he got upset with a teacher and told him, “I’ll wait outside, and when you get off work, I’ll whip your ass.”

That threat caused David to land a three-month juvenile sentence, which kept extending with regular fights while he served his time. In fact, he says, a state law was changed because he served so much time. It altered the period a juvenile could serve in juvenile detention before being sent to a much more serious facility.

He stresses that he’s not proud of his history, but he uses it as a warning and lesson to others.

“I took a negative thing and turned it into a positive,” David said. “I don’t want people thinking I would talk about this because I think it’s cool. It’s not cool. But even if you go down the wrong path, you can get out of it.”

When David was released, he searched for his next step in life.

David, both brothers admit, was more gifted in other sports, so he had a more varied athletic background. Something he certainly knew how to do well was fight. He learned quickly when he grew up, not just from his father’s lessons, but from results of school teasing because he and his brother are half black and half white.

“We met some problems because of that,” David said. “But not too many, because we’ve been in martial arts our whole life, we just didn’t know how to make a career out of it.”

They did eventually, but the younger Douglas chose a much different way to get there.
Damion, The Younger

By the time the brothers were in their teens, they had started to separate.

They were close growing up, but they diverted for a period. In that time, Damion stuck were closely with martial arts, which has been important to him since the very first days.

“I was kind of a loner,” Damion said. “All I wanted to do was work on martial arts.”

That’s not to say Damion was just going to the gym by himself to train. He underlines that their father taught the boys combat forms of martial arts. They learned how to fight and use it.

That meant Damion wasn’t very interested in teams or tournaments. His practice was actually fighting, in a protective kind of way.

“I would look to fight with the older kids,” he said. “I would look for guys who were picking on smaller or younger kids. I would start a fight with them. I could teach them a lesson and work on my skills.”

Even in the outside jobs he has held, fighting has always been part of Damion’s life. He worked briefly as a tow truck driver, but that didn’t take. Then he became a bouncer, and club owners recognized how well he could both clean up an ugly situation and control a room with his presence.

He was a loner, but he was a tough loner. Even at some of the biggest, nastiest clubs in San Francisco, Damion was effective, which made him a hot commodity.

He made good money. He got to fight. Both good things in Damion’s life. But, after awhile, the club community got to him.

“I’ve really been paid to fight the whole time, I was just wasn’t doing it in an organized way,” he said. “That (club) scene, it all comes with a price. It’s tough on the mind. You’re around a lot of drugs, alcohol, crazy women.”

And, really, Damion liked being around a gym, not a club. He liked the training.

The brothers were looking for a new way to use their martial arts skills. Cesar Gracie helped them both.

Twin Fighters

There has been one big-time, angry fight between the Douglas brothers.

They were about 14. It was a sparring session that became much more.

“I wasn’t even trying to make it serious,” David said. “People were watching us, and we were just kids. He popped me for real, and I told him, ‘Hit me like that again and I’ll give it to you.’

“Then I gave it to him.”

The “slugfest,” as David calls it, was the most serious the brothers ever battled each other. When they finally discovered MMA, they found similar success fighting other people.

They both entered the sport near the same time, when they were about 20. David was getting back into training after becoming a single dad at 19. A friend started showing him jiu-jitsu, a martial art the brothers didn’t know well. The friend introduced David to his teacher, who then took David to Gracie.

“He took one look at me in training, and he said, ‘This kid, he’s got it,'” David said.

Damion, meanwhile, was looking for a way to get out of the club scene. The brothers’ martial arts skill earned them a reputation around the area, and Damion had become friendly with future MMA fighter Nick Diaz.

Diaz told Damion he should meet Gracie. Another path to the same man.

“Cesar said, ‘You’re good, you wanna try to the sport?'” Damion said.

Then, both brothers were in the fold. At times, their careers have been closely tied.

“His first fight, it was supposed to be me,” David said of Damion’s 2004 amateur debut. “He really wanted to fight, so I said, ‘That’s fine, I’ll get another fight soon.’ I didn’t even have an amateur fight, I went straight to pro.”

David’s career has been more active. He won six of his first seven fights before suffering a defeat against Justin Wilcox at his first Strikeforce appearance in August 2009. He then won two Strikeforce fights, against Dominic Clark and Nick Gonzalez.

Damion made his professional debut in August 2007, and he fought four times in 13 months. His last fight came during the EliteXC show at which both brothers appeared.

Since, Damion has done more teaching at one of Cesar Gracie’s schools and waited for the right opportunity as David worked to create a foothold in Strikeforce.

On Friday, Damion will face Wayne Phillips (4-3) in a 170-pound fight, and David will take on Caros Fodor (7-2) in a 155-pound fight later in the night as they try to continue growing in the sport.

It’s fitting their next step is together, they said, because they train together regularly after going their own ways in past years.

“We’re different, but we both love the sport,” David said. “It’s been part of our lives for a long time, and we want to show we can do it right.”

Award-winning newspaper reporter Kyle Nagel is the lead features
writer for MMAjunkie.com. His weekly “Fight Path” column focuses on the
circumstances that led fighters to a profession in MMA. Know a fighter
with an interesting story? Email us at news [at] mmajunkie.com.

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